Tag Archives: Massachusetts General Hospital

How do you grow stem cells into lungs? The question has puzzled scientists for years. First you need the right recipe, and it took BU researchers Darrell Kotton, Tyler Longmire, and Laertis Ikonomou seven years of trial and error and painstaking science to come up with it. “A lot had to happen to make a lung,” says Kotton. “It was a little more complicated than Julia Child’s ‘heat, eat, bon appetit.’”

Kotton is a School of Medicine associate professor of medicine and pathology and codirector of the Center for Regenerative Medicine (CReM), Read More…

tem cell scientists scored what at first appeared an easy win for regenerative medicine when they discovered mesenchymal stem cells several decades ago. These cells, found in bone marrow, can give rise to fat, bone, and muscle tissue, and have been used in hundreds of clinical trials for tissue repair. Unfortunately, the results of these trials have been underwhelming. One problem is that these stem cells don’t stick around in the body long enough to benefit patients.

But Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) scientists at Boston Children’s Hospital aren’t ready to give up. A research team led by Juan Melero-Martin Read More…

Stem cells from the ovaries of reproductive age women can give rise to cells that appear to be mature oocytes, suggesting that women can produce more eggs than the batch they are born with. The findings, reported in the March 2012 issue of Nature Medicine, open the door to a new generation of assisted fertility treatments.

Germline stem cells that produce oocytes in vitro and fertilization-competent eggs in vivo have been identified in and isolated from adult mouse ovaries. Here we describe and validate a fluorescence-activated cell sorting-based protocol that can be used with adult mouse ovaries and human ovarian Read More…

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the start of a mid-stage clinical trial of an adult stem cell treatment for patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) according to its developer, BrainStorm Cell Therapeutics Inc. The Phase II clinical trial will be launched initially at UMass Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

BrainStorm, an Israel-based biotech company developing stem cell technology to provide treatments for currently incurable neurodegenerative diseases, has been working with Robert H. Brown Jr., DPhil, MD, the Leo P. and Theresa M. LaChance Chair in Medical Research and chair and professor of neurology, to Read More…

In a breakthrough, Harvard scientists have discovered that stem cells loaded with the herpes virus can be used to specifically target and kill brain tumours.

Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital have a potential solution for how to more effectively kill tumour cells using cancer-killing viruses.

The work, led by Khalid Shah, an HSCI Principal Faculty member, found that trapping virus-loaded stem cells in a gel and applying them to tumours significantly improved survival in mice with glioblastoma multiforme, the most common brain tumour in human adults and also the most difficult to treat (…)

Hereditary pulmonary alveolar proteinosis (herPAP) is a rare disease characterized by the slow build-up of lipo-protein material in the lungs due to the failure of highly specialized cells called macrophages, which usually eat away this material from the pulmonary air-space. Researchers demonstrate that a single transplantation of murine macrophages into the lungs of mice suffering […]

In a study of over 50 transcription factors, Tbx6 alone was able to stimulate mesoderm formation in laboratory-grown stem cells, and could cause those stem cells to become cardiovascular or musculoskeletal cells. Researchers found that this essential role of Tbx6 in mesoderm and cardiovascular specification is conserved from lower organisms to mammals. This research report […]

Researchers have created a drug delivery system (DDS) using a poly (ethylene glycol)-poly(lysine) block copolymer-ubenimex conjugate (PEG-b-PLys(Ube)). The use of this DDS has enabled an increase in the concentration of ubenimex in target CSCs. In addition, combined use of standard anticancer drugs significantly decreased CSCs.

Scientists have uncovered a reason for the uncanny likeness between cells in the most malignant cancers and the embryonic cells of the organ in which the cancer originated: cells in human basal-like breast cancers share features with the embryonic mammary (breast) stem cells that are the progenitors of all cell types in the mammary gland […]

A new comprehensive natural history study about Amish nemaline myopathy (ANM) in the Old Order Amish population focuses on the promise of gene therapy for this lethal disorder. Amish nemaline myopathy (ANM) is an infantile-onset muscle disease linked to a mutation of the TNNT1 gene. The study summarizes genealogical records, clinical data, and molecular reports […]

Researchers delayed signs of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in rodents by injecting them with a second-generation drug designed to silence the gene, superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1). The results suggest the newer version of the drug may be effective at treating an inherited form of the disease caused by mutations in SOD1.